Here’s a nasty scenario imagined by Niall Ferguson: What if the Heathrow Bombers Succeeded?

We cannot assume, for obvious legal reasons, that the suspects who were charged in London are anything other than innocent, as they themselves maintain. Nor should we speculate about those who haven’t yet been released or charged. So let us merely hypothesize that some young British Muslims really were plotting to assemble bombs out of liquid-based explosives and iPod-shaped detonators and to detonate them aboard multiple transatlantic planes. Suppose it had happened yesterday. Imagine yourself, in a parallel universe, turning on the radio and hearing the following bulletin:

“Five passenger aircraft have blown up in midair and crashed into the Atlantic. The planes — believed to be operated by American Airlines and United Airlines — left this morning from Heathrow Airport, bound for the United States. There are no reported survivors.”

Such a calamity would at once have been dubbed “8/27.” But the political consequences would have been very different from those that followed 9/11.

Five years ago, the world reacted with astounding unanimity. “Nous sommes tous Américains,” wrote Jean-Marie Colombani in Le Monde. Londoners felt an intense empathy with New Yorkers.

At the same time, 9/11 generated a surge of patriotic feeling in the targeted country. Americans rallied around a president who had been in office less than a year, having come to power by the most contentious of margins.

An 8/27 would have been diametrically different. From an American vantage point, a successful terrorist plot launched from Heathrow would have been doubly Britain’s fault. Its proximate cause would have been a lapse in British security. Its root cause would have been the infiltration of British society by radical Islamism.

Very on-target comments. And eventually, one of these plots will succeed.

UPDATE at 8/29/06 9:05:00 am:

You can read the article without registering by clicking the link on this Google page: ‘What if the Heathrow Bombers Succeeded?’